Introduction

The cultural memory of The Piano (1993) is characterised by numerous visual and aural cues that remain fixed in the mind, shaping how it has been remembered. For some, it is the memory of Michael Nyman's score, and the now-familiar melody of ‘The Heart Asks Pleasure First’. For others, it is the passion of Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) and George Baines's (Harvey Keitel) illicit love affair. Or, conversely, the life-changing violence enacted by Ada's vengeful husband Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), when he severs his wife's finger with an axe. Maybe it is the ending of the film, where Ada imagines her piano in ‘its ocean grave’, and then herself, tied to it by a rope, floating in the deep, engulfed by silence (Figure 4.1). The film's 25th anniversary re-release in 2018 offered the opportunity to return to The Piano, and its final moments have lost none of their resonance, forming the basis of the analysis in this chapter. The rope creates a physical connection between Ada's mind, body, spirit, and her piano. The rope confirms what Ada and the audience who identify with her already know; something which they feel throughout the film but, until the moment of Ada's imagining, they cannot see. The significance of this image is not limited to its affective power, nor its endurance in the memory; it also offers a way into considering the film's relationship to the body, the phenomenological, and the haptic.

Drawing on Laura Marks's (1998) concept of haptic visuality, I examine The Piano's haptic potential, first as a framework through which to read the film, and second, as a textually located quality within Campion's signature style. This quality intersects at aesthetic and thematic levels, strengthening the audience's identification with Ada while amplifying the emotive, affective, and expressive functions of Michael Nyman's score, allowing it to transcend traditional cultural spaces typically occupied by soundtracks. This analysis contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions of the haptic which extend beyond vision and into sound, engaging with work by Vivian Sobchack (2004) and Sue Gillett (1995) on gender and embodied spectatorship, and music theory by Michel Chion (1999, 2007, 2009), Claudia Gorbman (2000), and Kathryn Kalinak (1992), to consider the expressive and affective functions performed by the score. I argue these functions are inherent to understanding how the film explores Ada's subjectivity and why the film continues to resonate with audiences.